Personal
Individuals are distinct, autonomous, and responsible for their decisions. Their actions shape their inner experience, future behavior, and sense of purpose.
Strong individuals nurture strong communities, and strong communities nurture strong individuals.
Personal growth is essential in the promotion of holistic, systemic change. For many, personal growth involves spiritual development.
As the Minnesota Character Council states:
A person's character consists of values and habits which shape behavior. A person of good character is trustworthy, responsible, and concerned with the well-being of others. Good character consists of healthy self-awareness, positive self-management, insightful social awareness, and the ability to establish and maintain healthy and rewarding relationships.
Unfortunately, however, society inculcates widespread status anxiety, which Alain de Botton discusses in Status Anxiety.
One’s position in society...[and] one’s value and importance in the eyes of the world (increasingly is) is awarded in relation to financial achievement…. The consequences of high status (prompt worry) that we are failing to conform to the ideals of success laid down by our society and that we may as a result be stripped of dignity and respect; a worry that we are occupying too modest a rung or are about to fall to a lower one…. ” Our self-conception is so dependent on what others make of us…. Our position hangs on what we can achieve.
In the corporate world, women face “pressure to give up what they saw as their relational style in favor of the hard-charging ‘masculine’ style the firm venerated in client interactions,” as Jessica Grouse reports. Mothers who did become law partners were routinely belittled by colleagues as bad mothers and bad role models.
Such realities led Nobel Prize winner Claudia Goldin to conclude, “We’re never going to have gender equality until we also have couple equity.”
Achieving this goal requires deep personal changes, especially with men but also with women who can enhance their partnership skills. The desire to dominate and the willingness to submit are deeply embedded.
Modern conditions undermine compassionate, active listening. Conversations become a series of monologues. Soulful dialogues are rare.
With social isolation increasing, opportunities for economic advancement decrease. Hyper-competition produces despair. And bullying provokes resentment.
Vivian Gornick writes, “Humiliation lingers in the mind, the heart, the veins, the arteries forever. It allows people to brood for decades on end, often deforming their inner lives.” Mass shootings, political assassination attempts, and rage-filled populism result. Attention to what’s moral is neglected.
In “Scorn and the American Story,” David Brooks concludes, “Loss of status can cause people to retreat to their tribal categories, dwell in the lost glories of the past, bloat with resentment toward rivals and lash out with horrific violence.”
Modern conditions leave many people searching for new lifestyles. In “The Age of Anti-Ambition,” Noreen Malone argues, “When 25 million people leave their jobs, it’s about more than just burnout.… A lot of people don’t like what they see.”
Most people struggle with arrogance, but controlling emotions, instincts, intuitions, and biases is like riding an elephant. As Jonathan Haidt wrote: “The emotional tail wags the rational dog.”
In his magnum opus, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman sums up decades of research and urges readers to strengthen “slow thinking” to better manage “fast thinking.”
Rationality demands discipline, practice, and effort, but when over-confident, we often fail. A humble understanding of why and how we don’t always choose the most rational action can help us be better human beings.
Unconditional love, including the compassionate understanding of antagonists, is liberating. "Folks need to know the ways we change and are changed when we love,” bell hooks affirms. “It is only by bearing concrete witness to love's transformative power in our daily lives that we can assure those who are fearful that commitment to love will be redemptive, a way to experience salvation."
Over two million people have signed the Charter for Compassion. Its vision is to help create a transformed world where all life flourishes with compassion. Its network supports an emerging global movement to co-create transformation at all levels by connecting, cultivating, and encouraging networks of compassionate action.
Holistic democracy movement members could take care of themselves to better care for others. Most people want to be a better person, less judgmental, and more compassionate. With a commitment to controlling or undoing dominate-and-submit programming, members could undertake self-improvement efforts on their own (as well as with others).
This requires balancing self-centeredness and compassion. Self-care methods (including spiritual practices for those who adopt this approach) such as good nutrition, exercise, relaxation, enhancing rationality, communing with Mother Nature, being healed by music are essential.
“I can’t change the world until I change myself” is often self-centeredness that becomes a never-ending excuse for avoiding the difficulties associated with collective social change efforts. if “fat-shaming," for instance, “is the result of the weight-loss industry’s machinations,” as Becca Rothfeld argues
we almost certainly cannot alter our feelings without altering the institutional arrangements that support them. Flanagan may be right that emotions are culturally specific—but we will still have to change a culture in order to change the emotions that it generates. How effective can a personal crusade really be when the gears of the shame machine go on grinding?
Alissa Bennett wrote,
Even the “healthiest” of shaming (is) a request for compliance that is hinged to a threat of ostracization. The basic “us” versus “you” dichotomy that foregrounds even the most benign of shaming always stands in the shadow of the hierarchical tower.
Moreover, merely trying to change the world changes you, and a better world will nurture personal change. Increased self-awareness, self-examination, and self-discipline lead to positive changes that impact others and boost prospects for major, fundamental change.
The above linked resources document the arguments presented in this Introduction.
The above linked tools, some tested and others untested, present methods that compassion-mind people can advance the holistic democracy movement, whether or not they identify with this movement or the compassionate humanity community or explicitly commit to mutual support for self-improvement.
NEXT: Cultural